


ascension

by rukafais



Series: a study of divinity [3]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Appropriate Violence, Gen, death of random bugs/enemies/etc, mild/moderate gore, teen rating just to be safe, the pale king eats sentient bugs and doesn't care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 09:06:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18407495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: The Wyrm dies. The Pale King lives, and breathes, andhungers.





	ascension

**Author's Note:**

> I really like the implied idea that the Pale King was just thoroughly alien in a lot of ways, so it ties in a lot to how I write him - unsettling and alien and not particularly concerned with individuals. He just does what he needs to, as it suits him, and doesn't care.
> 
> Also, I do like the fact that even Hallownest's civilized bugs were implied to have been encouraged or permitted to eat other, 'lesser' bugs, because That's How Bugs Are, so I try to incorporate that into my interpretation as well.

He does not know how long he spends crafting his own shell, the doll that will hold the vast depths of his consciousness. Time is irrelevant to someone as old as him. He has sat and watched kingdoms rise and fall, in his long, slow travels. He has seen endless sunrises and endless sunsets. He has seen centuries passing in the slow beat of a heart. Nothing has ever been able to hold his devouring, infinite curiosity for long. The world is small and banal and grey.

(He feels his body dying, feels the signals that mean the end of his life is close. But death is simply transformation, one form being changed for another.

He expects his second life to be more of that same banality.)

He carves it with mechanical precision. A crown that mirrors the mouth he will lose. Chitin as white and pristine as the form he will shed. Joints and segments assembled with delicate care to make it look like the bugs that scurry to and fro under his ancient eye, but not quite; something new, something _unique._

Something fit for godhood.

As his own organs fail, he crafts and places, with painstaking care, new and smaller ones. ( _This shell will bleed, and breathe; it will have all the things that living bugs have, but it will stand apart from them. It will never fall as they do, because in truth its core, its heart, is his own unending will._ ) As his body begins to decay, he makes the last touches on the body that is waiting to be born. ( _Ash flakes from his inert form, already falling. Already beginning to cover the place he has chosen to die._ )

He looks it over, infinitely patient, to make certain there are no flaws or cracks in his design.

_The darkness of death gnaws and claws at the edges of his mind, unraveling it little by little; he is not afraid, because he does not know what it means to fear, what it means to be mortal, what it means to die._

The Wyrm dies. Its carcass rots, slowly, and the world is smaller for losing it.

What is born from its remains has no name, and an ancient mind, and shines painful and bright like a star fallen to earth.

* * *

Life is faster here, measured in the space of breath, the space of heartbeat. He wanders among his own ash, content to observe from a distance, until he finds himself with a strange weakness, an odd sensation.

A wyrm does not need to eat much. They are creatures impossibly large, impossibly slow, more like landmarks than living beings. They simply exist. But hunger had seized him, now and then, in the passage of time - and he had consumed what was in front of him. He had not bothered to catalogue taste or texture, or even what it was that he had eaten.

( _Scarlet fire illuminates the ruin of a land devoured, far to the south, where his journey began._ )

He finds himself hungry, but he does not know what bugs eat to sate themselves, so he tries what he can. Rocks and plants are acceptable - they are broken down by efficient processes, far beyond the level of any imperfectly created being - but his body craves something else.

Finally, he turns his gaze to the mindless creatures that fly and crawl, that he had dismissed as being below his attentions. _Prey_ , something in him says.

They are so _easy_ to kill.

He punctures soft abdomens and snaps thin necks with deadly precision; once he understands their patterns, their ways of running or hiding or foolishly attacking, they are no challenge to him at all.

Once he is bored of killing them, he begins to catch them. Fascinated with how they squirm to get away from him, making their strange small sounds, he takes them to pieces over and over until his curiosity is satisfied. Legs and wings and scattered parts litter the ground, and their fluids are dark stains against the stark whiteness of his shell.

He piles up the bodies, devoid of movement or life. He eats until he feels hunger subside, and looks at the remains with nothing more than faint disapproval. So inefficient, so distasteful. So _messy._ But it will do.

While he cleans himself, he hears the sound of something new. Something cautious to approach. So he sits, still as a statue, barely breathing, and waits.

(He already sees them as _prey_. He already sees them as _beneath him._

That will not change.)

This one has a voice - not like the chittering, squeaking things. It speaks, and forms words. When he reaches out and seizes it, it struggles. It, too, is mindless in its own way, but in a different way. It has a spark, a light inside, dancing in its eyes.

He lets it speak until it runs out of words. He dismantles it without care for its sudden noise, until it stops moving.

An impulse comes over him - from the shell and not from the mind that pilots it - and he extends still-stained mouthparts and bites into the limp body. It is still warm. He takes another bite, and another, and another, until bright blood spills from broken chitin. It glows with light.

The light is not his. It is foreign. Different. It burns hot and bright.

But he wonders if that light could be replaced.

The gears of his mind spin in furious thought as he devours his prey. (He thinks so much _better_ , now that he’s eaten. A machine must be oiled; so too, the body must be fed. A lesson learned, if a tedious one.)

He finishes his meal.

In the mess and viscera of the dead, he receives his first taste of divinity, and hungers for more.

* * *

He remembers gods, of course. How could he not? An old, slow mind has little to do but dream, to observe the few sparks of light that are capable of ensaring his attention.

A blinding-bright and singing sun; an endless, dark flame; the rolling winds and storms that thunder across dreams of empty plains. Water that lives and shines in verdant green. And more. Endless gods and endless lives.

They thrive with their worshippers; there is devotion. There is power.

The ingredients are so, so simple. Find simple bugs and give them a land to live, a beacon to follow. In return, they are devoted servants, and their belief becomes strength. 

One bug alone, simple and barely capable of thought, is still weak. Lulled into obedience by that brightly-burning sun. But there are more - there must be more - or she would not be as powerful as he remembers her to be.

He watches for more bugs - the ones with that light inside, that potential for more. He is careful to hide among his death, so his white carapace will blend in, because they are more cautious about danger than the squirming bugs and beasts driven by instinct alone and nothing else.

( _He learns, too, to devour them until no scrap remains, so the bodies cannot be found. They save their dead, the empty shells with no spark inside, for a reason he does not comprehend. The living bugs place flowers, or decorations. They carry away the bodies. They do not come again._ )

He catches them and listens to their babbling, absorbing the language. Sound falls into his head like rain into an empty well, filling it until he can craft the words himself, until he can comprehend them.

He is making himself new. He is making himself like one of them, until he can reveal himself to not be one of them at all. A predator, a mimic, an old soul with centuries of thought and cunning inside a new and pale shell that seems weak as prey. 

He thinks faster and moves faster than he has ever had to in this new existence, fighting against time, learning, learning, always learning. A perfect machine, every gear and every part in place, constructing a perfect camouflage.

It is infuriating, frustrating, _thrilling._ It is nothing like he thought it would be. It is a life so different from what he was.

He practices the words until they sound right. Then, with the patience of a hunter laying a trap, he waits.

The prey approaches.

“ _Help me,_ ” he rasps, soft and feeble. (His voice is soft only because he has not practiced the words too much, because it is beneficial for him to sound soft and clumsy and helpless, to stumble and fall.)

They hesitate, for a moment, and then they offer him a hand. Acceptance. Curiosity. All things he can use.

Good.

He takes it, and allows them to pull him to his feet, and follows them into the dark.

Some day, this will all be his. But the weakness, the softness, comes first. The pretending.

( _Already, the darkness in their eyes reflects his light, and not hers._ )

The beginning of her end is here.


End file.
